Tag Archives: Kris Kobach

Texas’ S.B. 4 is a License to Discriminate:This past Sunday in the shadow of night, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas signed into law SB4 which would go into effect in September. The legislation, opposed by a host of police chiefs from all over Texas, calls on law enforcement to inquire about immigration status in traffic stops and other interactions, allows police officers to question children about immigration status, and mandates fines and jail time for elected officials and law enforcement who fail to comply with the discriminatory law, even though it may make them complicit in violating constitutional safeguards. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it has the spirit of previous racial profiling bills passed in Alabama, Arizona and other states where taxpayers bore the burden of litigation. NCLR joined the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCHR), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ), Mi Familia Vota, the Human Rights Campaign, and the National Urban League (NUL) in a press conference denouncing the legislation. Janet Murguía, President and CEO, NCLR, said, “Gov. Abbott’s action is reckless and irresponsible. S.B.4 represents a false promise to those looking for real solutions on immigration. Rather than solving anything, this deeply troubling and unconstitutional legislation will jeopardize the civil rights of millions of Texans, nearly half of whom are Hispanic, and undermine public safety in communities across the state. As an organization that works to protect and defend America’s Latino community and uphold the core values of this nation, NCLR condemns this new law and others like it, and the bigotry and intolerance they represent.”

At a House of Representatives hearing this week on President Obama’s administrative relief programs for undocumented immigrants, Republican witnesses trotted out one of their favorite canards—that voter fraud poses a threat to the integrity of our elections. Specifically, they asserted that the president’s executive action, which will allow millions of immigrants to obtain Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses, increases the risk that noncitizens will register and vote in U.S. elections.

To be clear, there are already millions of legal permanent residents and legally authorized immigrants living in the U.S. with Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses. Yet according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, numerous investigations into the alleged voting of noncitizens have shown that instances of unintentional registration are extremely isolated and rare.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Photo: Wikipedia

Consider one of the witnesses at this week’s hearing: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, best known for his work on anti-immigrant laws such as Arizona SB 1070 and an outspoken proponent of voter ID laws. Kobach’s own office has identified just 18 cases of alleged voter fraud from the 2010 and 2012 Kansas elections—out of 1.7 million registered voters. Even if these allegations all proved true (and they do not all involve noncitizens), the incidence of voter fraud in Kobach’s home state would be negligible at 0.001 percent.

While voter fraud itself is largely imaginary, the purported solutions to this nonproblem pose an all-too-real threat to the integrity of our elections. For example, voter ID laws, which now exist in 31 states, impose disproportionate burdens on Latino voters, who are less likely than Whites to have a photo ID. An election eve poll of registered Latino voters showed that 14percent of Hispanics who did not vote in the 2014 elections lacked an unexpired form of identification—evidence of the chilling effect that voter ID laws can have on Latino participation. Worse, efforts to purge voter rolls of noncitizens are notoriously flawed, with the potential to disenfranchise large numbers of eligible voters.

The real threat to democracy is not voter fraud. It is, rather, those who would suppress the votes of millions of U.S. citizens in the name of “preventing” it.

Despite a general consensus at Monday’s fifth Senate Judiciary Committee immigration hearing this year, a voice of opposition came from minority-side witness Kris Kobach, the current Secretary of State of Kansas. Aside from Kobach, a diverse set of witnesses expressed their support for the recently introduced bipartisan immigration bill and urged the Senate to move forward with reform.

Kobach, however, stands out among his fellow panelists. He is best known for being the brains behind the slew of devastating anti-immigrant laws adopted in several states over the past few years, including Arizona’s SB 1070 in 2010 and similar laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri. More recently, he served as immigration policy advisor to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and is largely credited for the “self-deportation” policy embraced by the Romney campaign.